


759 Nights Later

by inkp0p



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Game, Blood, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, M/M, Mild Gore, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Post-Apocalypse, Quadrant Confusion, Quadrant Vacillation, Sort of..., Very Very Mild, i put the warning in there just to be safe, ill advised diy medical practices, implied/referenced mind control fungus, nothing graphic though, torn gills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 05:30:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19350460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkp0p/pseuds/inkp0p
Summary: bakedpotatocat:"The boys live after the end of the world, caused by a machine uprising that still partially haunts the land. Eridan comes back injured from a scavenging / hunting mission and the other two freak out, despite Eridan's assurances that he's fine.I want either a little bit of angst and/or hurt/comfort (whether Eridan is actually seriously injured or his boyfriends are worrywarts is up to you) but they should all be safe and sound by the end of the fic. If it really is just a flesh wound, maybe they pass out on the couch together in order to soothe Karkat and Sollux's fears, or if it is serious, maybe they have to stitch him up and then baby him for a while. Or somewhere in between."





	759 Nights Later

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bakedpotatocat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bakedpotatocat/gifts).



> I went with the machine uprising route, but with a bit of a twist! Since so much of Alternia's technology is sorta organic (the hivestems, game grubs, helmsmen, etc). Hope you like it!

756 nights.  
It’s been 756 nights since the ships fell from the sky, cutting through the nights like so many comets, so many meteors, so many shooting stars.  
You would have made a wish if you’d known what was coming next.  
  
—  
  
Your fins have plastered themselves to either side of your face the same way your shirt has plastered itself to your torso. They both feel just as damp; your fins sing with sweat, your shirt with violet blood. The penultimate hue used to mean something around here, you reckon. In the desert, though, you have little more to impress than the dust beneath your boots and the grit caught between your fangs. Your pack is still full of cans of food and sopor patches, too stubborn to yield any to waste even for the sake of a lighter load.  
  
You bleed, and you bleed, and you think of hive.  
  
—  
  
You wonder if they miss you. They’re something of a matched set, you’ve decided, apropos of nothing. Your pale and your spade, lines between those quads blurring further each night. One stretched brittle like corroded wire; the other with broad shoulders that burn illegally (when a mutant’s hue used to mean something, you reckon) against yours. Yet they wore near identical expressions of disapproval when you said you were going out on a supply run.  
  
Maybe in another lifetime you’d listened; in another lifetime, you were still holed up with them in that knockoff suburban hovel, instead of dying in the goddamn south Alternian flats. It’s nice to think about, at least.  
  
Or maybe you’re just this stupid in all timelines. That particular thought is, perhaps, a little less comforting.

—

It’s been 758 nights since the ships fell. 

It’s been eight, now, since you left.   
  
The blood on your side has dried across your gills. Your shirt extracted itself, painfully, from the damaged tissue the day before, no longer plastered in place.  Peeled itself away like a dead limb shucked from a tree, your shirt now just makes occasional passes against your torn side, which isn’t much better.   
  
Your limbs are sea-rock, they’re the dark water that settles down at the base of an ocean trench that supports marginal life. You should feel hot but you only feel the chill.   
  
You keep walking during nights, when the stars above you are so bright and numerous you can see the edge of the galaxy. It looks gentle and you feel your own fragility in it. During the day, you use your suncloak as a tarp and pray you don’t wake up with new burns.  
  
You’ve never felt cold before, not like this. 

—  
  
When you’d found refuge in the suburbs it had seemed so perfect.   
  
The ships had fallen from the sky 238 nights before.   
  
Prefab hives were common in low-midblood sectors; this one was primarily zoned for olives, like the one Kar had grown up in. They were churned out dime a dozen by the construction drones, all nearly identical and made of inorganic material, which meant they survived the Rot when it came.  
  
(Unlike the hivestems, grown from the ground and brimming with biotech. They and their inhabitants all went first. You’d gotten Sol out by the skin of your fangs.)  
  
It wasn’t much, but, to borrow a turn of phrase, it was home. Your home, in the tangled, quadrant-smeared mess you could make of whatever your world had become. You’d tried to divide rooms up into sleeping quarters before you realized none of you could sleep outside arms of a different temperature, and the top floor became storage while the bottom became a pile of whatever you could find, alongside a fairly sizable couch.  
  
When the drones (Alternia had been so proud of its technology yet none of it was immune) made their passes you would all lay hidden from their searchlights, Sol’s hand sparking against one of yours, Kar squeezing the life out of your other.  
  
—  
  
This last scavenging mission is the furthest you’ve gone from that little home of yours.  
  
With a full skin of water and two healthy sets of gills it had only taken you a night and some change to cross this stretch of the southern flats. The cul-de-sac you’d holed up in dried out supply-wise quite a while ago, and Sol had been making all the longer distance runs (psionic showoff), but your turn had come and you’d made the sales pitch that you’d be fine crossing the flats on your own. The lot of you needed to see what you could salvage from the city, you’d argued.  
  
Sol’s hands had worried themselves to the quick; Kar chewed the inside of that bottom lip of his until he was practically spitting blood, but they’d let you go, eventually.  
  
Gods, if you make it back alive your boys are going to kill you dead.  
  
—  
  
It’s been 759 nights since the ships fell from the sky; since the Rot consumed your world; since this virus overcame every scrap of tech the Empire had risen from itself; since the helmsmen fell last and they fell hardest and their ships fell from the sky, cutting through the nights like so many comets, so many meteors, so many shooting stars.  
  
It’s been nine nights since you left your heart, divided up and bound into Sollux Captor and Karkat Vantas.  
  
And you are so tired.  
  
You find a patch of bush scrub and call it something like shade. It’ll do for now; your eyes are all you need to rest. The sea-rock of your limbs keeps pulling you down, down into that same abyss. You haven’t seen a drone since you escaped the city.  You aren’t worried about it, now.  

You settle on the dirt and pull your cloak around your shoulders to keep out the chill that you’re now certain must be real. Even your gills don’t hurt all that bad now, though you’re faintly worried about getting grit in the tissue. 

You can worry about that later.  For now you just need to rest your eyes. 

  
—  
  
You aren’t aware of time passing, but at some point you stop worrying about the grit.  
  
—  
  
You imagine blue and red light somewhere beyond your lids and it makes you ache.  
  
—  
  
You sleep.  
  
— — — —  
  
Your name is SOLLUX CAPTOR and you are going to kill your goddamn kismesis dead.  
  
It took you and KK about half a night to start worrying and five full nights to realize he wasn’t coming back. It was PRETTY SELF-EVIDENT neither of you was about to let the other traipse out alone and potentially get sniped in the same embarrassing sandpile that ED was probably laid out in, so you’d been doing joint search parties during... more or less every waking hour of the night. Food was rationed out more strictly so supply runs could stall out for the time being, and even the daylight hours spent at hive were rarely spent asleep, patches already used and overused three times over.  
  
KK, to his enduring credit, at least makes a somewhat more bearable co-pilot than ED; when the two of you fly in your broad, searching sweeps, at least he doesn’t cling to you like a scalded purrbeast and bitch about heights.  
  
It takes three nights of concentrated effort to find him tucked beside the patchy off-green foliage that dots the outskirts of your cul-de-sac. It looks like he’d been only about four hours of walking from your shared hive--then again, with the blood soaking his side, it’s hard to be sure. Unconscious, but breathing; you hadn’t heard his voice echo in your head, harmonizing with the members of the Imminently Deceased. You’d listened, you’d dreaded, but it’d never come.  
  
“He’s fine,” Karkat declares after you set him back on his feet. You aren’t entirely sure if that’s his at-a-glance ten feet away absolutely professional assessment or if he’s just desperately looking for confirmation. Eridan doesn’t answer, and neither does the desert, but you hum an equally-searching affirmation and he seems content to take it as gospel. Your... flush... pale... pitch... person, crouches beside your equally confusing pitch-pale, and flips one hand palm side up, confirming a pulse you already know is there.  
  
Yet that doesn’t do as much for the knot in your stomach as you’d hoped it might.  
  
“...He’s hot, though.”  
  
“Gods, keep your voice down, he’ll hear you.”  
  
“Wow, really funny, Captor! Ha, ha! Look at you, perpetual motion chuckle machine, cranking it out like it’s paying the bills. Our boyfriend is lying prone and overheating in the vast wasteland of our post-apocalyptic hellscape, but I’m glad you’re still managing to heap those chortles into the oven and keep us all alit with your scathing burns.”  
  
“Of course he’s running hot, dipshit, he’s been inhaling sand for who knows how long.” You aren’t sure what to do with your hands. They settle against each other, then in your pockets, then you cross your arms. Staring at Eridan is doing you no good either, but your gaze bounces between him and Karkat.  
  
“He’s fine, though?”  
  
This time it really is a question. You hum, again, in concession. “He’s fine,” you echo, tongue catching on your front teeth.  
  
The three of you are fine. Tonight, as in all nights, that’s enough.  
  
—  
  
The three of you make it back to your hive without incident, but Eridan doesn’t quite rouse to consciousness, either. There are a few times he fakes it—a quiet groan, a shift of his weight in your psionic-grip as you fly your happy little trio homeside—but he never quite surfaces. Karkat clears a space on the countertop of your nutritionblock to lay him out, and to get a better look at those gills. The remnants of his tattered shirt give way easily beneath a blade you scrounged up (you refrain from making a joke about how sad he’s going to be to have missed this bit of knifeplay), and it brings his tattered respiratory tissue to focus.  
  
You pull in a wince between your teeth, sympathetically. You don’t have gills yourself but you’ve been up and close personal with his plenty of times; it’s enough to know that they aren’t supposed to look like that.  
  
“How bad is it?” Karkat’s been mixing lukewarm water and salt in a bowl, something as roughly approximate to the ocean as they can bring this far inland.  
  
“Oh, you know, it’s not—” you clear your throat “—not great, maybe—” you clear your throat, again “—yeah, Handmaid hold me, he looks like a pile of ground moobeast, eheh, _fuck_ .”  
  
Karkat has to stand on the tips of his toes to look over your shoulder, and when he does, he seems to come roughly to the same conclusion, ‘cause he swears against your back damn near hard enough for it to rattle your ribs. “And he’s not awake yet?”  
  
“Not awake yet,” you confirm. You carefully pick bits of his shirt out of the mess of dried blood, but it doesn’t do much for him. Probably does more for you, honestly, fingers content with the illusion of productivity. Eventually, after you’ve picked at invisible thread for nearly another five minutes, Karkat nudges you out of the way with surprising gentleness. He’s got the saltwater bowl and a damp cloth, which he uses to start cleaning Eridan’s gills in earnest.  
  
Eridan groans, softly, and Karkat’s hands go still, waiting to see if this is another false alarm.  
  
“Deeps fuck me runnin’, I’m goin’ to tear every metallic fuck planetside to scrap pieces—shit, ow.”  
  
Alright, looks like that one wasn’t a false alarm. Your exhalation comes with the doorprize of a flat, startled laugh. Karkat looks near ready to shit a brick in relief.  
  
Eridan’s eyes, filled in violet sweeps ago, are pain-dilated and fixed on the ceiling overhead. He’s every inch a cornered, injured predator, but for your sakes—yours and Karkat’s—he keeps himself flattened out against the countertop, fins waving and flicking. You remember near the beginning of this little arrangement of yours when he lashed out in pain and nearly took your arm out of its socket.  
  
That was just a couple dozen nights after The Rot—some kind of fungus, hijacking the half-organic-half-machine technology of Alternia—all but razed the planet. Had you been any further in your helms training, it would have almost certainly gotten you, too.  
  
You’ve all come a long way, you suppose.  
  
“So,” you say, breaking the silence after a few moments that are otherwise only punctuated by Eridan’s labored breathing, “what did we learn about running off into the desert?”  
  
“Get bent, Sol.”  
  
“Missed you too, babe.”  
  
Karkat ignores you both and pours half the bowl of salt water onto Eridan’s side; his gills flare and do the best they can to cycle the oxygen out of it, though it trickles back out and puddles on the nutritionblock floor. It sends him into a coughing fit, but it’s very much the sound of being alive.  
  
— — — —  
  
Your name is KARKAT VANTAS and you, god among men, have wrangled both your errant quads onto the couch.  
  
For all your bitching about Ampora’s solo adventure, it’s good to have fresh sopor patches again. And for the first time in a perigee, you all have full stomachs, too. The patient himself has been bandaged up and situated in the middle of your three-person-pile, you on one side, Captor on the other. You suspect he’s using you as twin heating pads. He gets a pass, this time, solidified by the fact that the side of your head has taken up residence on his shoulder.  
  
The exact moment you know this peace won’t last is the exact moment you hear Sollux pipe up with a “You’re so fucking cold” from his other side.  
  
“I only feel cold to you ‘cause you were hatched out of whatever the sweatiest part a the grubmother was.”  
  
“We should try refrigerating cuts of meat on your gross ichthyoid torso or whatevs.”  
  
When Eridan moves to cuff Sollux on the side of the head, the motion sets him wincing, and Sollux sits up like a shot in alarm. You can tell from here that Eridan’s fine, so the dissonance between Sollux’s whining and Sollux’s hair-trigger concern pulls a warm laugh from somewhere deep in your stomach.  
  
You’d join in, if not for the fact that the fresh sopor is pulling on your senses.  
  
“Glad that was so fuckin’ funny, Kar,” you hear somewhere to your right. You fumble to put a hand over his face, just sorta, really smooshing it there in something like a clumsy pap. That seems to settle him down, for now.  
  
The soft bickering continues sometime after that, but you’re only marginally aware of it. Eventually, it settles into silence.  
  
The three of you are fine. Tonight, as in all nights, that’s enough.


End file.
